This is one of those features that seems so common sense that it's surprising it's taken this long to show up. It reminds me of when Gmail and Outlook started giving you a warning if you said the word "attached" or "attachment" in an email, but didn't attach files.<p>This reminds me of the best email storm I ever saw. Someone at a large company I worked at sent an email to a discussion group that everyone had filtered with rules, but they put a one-letter typo in the domain name. So imagine something like sending it to HugeGroup@enail.com instead of @email.com. The thing was, the company actually owned enail.com to keep competitors from squatting on it, so the email actually went through, but completely broke almost everyone's rules. The results were quite spectacular, and entertaining.
Whenever I’ve worked at a company with Exchange/Outlook I always set up my one mail rule I can’t live without: any incoming email that doesn’t have my own email address in the To: or Cc: fields is moved into a different inbox (subfolder).<p>It was rare for any unaddressed stuff to matter to me, and it was certainly never urgent, so usually I gave it a quick scan once a day and mark it read.<p>Almost makes email tolerable.
I've seen a few of these and, as somebody without anything to do with the running of the email servers, I can say that they have been quite good fun to watch.<p>The right thing to do, of course, is email the whole group asking them to stop emailing the whole group ....
I don't know anything about email software, but would it be difficult to add a popup after hitting the "Send" button that would appear only if there were more than X recipients (w/ a user-configurable minimum and sane default)?<p>Something like: "This email will be sent to 5,000 people. Are you sure you would like to send it?"
<i>"10 reply-all emails to over 5,000 recipients within 60 minutes"</i><p>It reads like that's hardcoded. Surprised you can't configure it. A welcome feature nonetheless.<p>Edit: Appears it is hardcoded, at least for now. <i>"We are considering possible future enhancements to improve our reply all storm detection accuracy, add admin customizable thresholds and block duration, as well as producing reply all storm reports and notifications."</i>
Story time - Steve Ballmer sends an email to the entire company about buying Nokia. Some high level exec replies all and says "Told you so ". To which Ballmer also replies all with a smiley. Don't know if they knew they were replying all. Or if they didn't care. Quite bizarre.
There's no faster way for me to know that someone is a person I'd never want to work with than if they participate in a reply all storm. It's 2020. Learn how email works.
I wonder if there is an exception for execs. At a previous employer it was quite common for a big piece of news to be announced by a senior exec and then have the CEO and other execs reply all in a big storm. Definitely more than 5,000 FTE on the list.